What Is an AI Anyway? | Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI

Mustafa Suleyman thinks that AI should best be understood as something like a new digital species. He predicts that we'll come to see them as digital companions, new partners in the journeys of all our lives.

AI must be seen in an evolutionary context. From the very first microscopic organisms, life on Earth stretches back billions of years. Over that time life evolved and diversified, then a few million years ago something began to shift. After countless cycles of growth and adaptation, one of life's branches began using tools and that branch grew into us.

We went on to produce a mesmerizing variety of tools at first slowly and then with astonishing speed. We went from stone axes and fire to language, writing and eventually industrial technologies. One invention unleashed a thousand more and in time we became homo technologicus.

Around 80 years ago, another new branch of technology began with the invention of computers. We quickly jumped from the first mainframes and transistors to today's smartphones and virtual reality headsets.

Information, knowledge, communication, computation. In this revolution, creation has exploded like never before. And now a new wave is upon us. Artificial Intelligence. These waves of history are clearly speeding up as each one is amplified and accelerated by the last.

And if you look back it's clear that we are in the fastest and most consequential wave ever. The journeys of humanity and technology are now deeply intertwined. In just 18 months, over a billion people have used large language models. We've witnessed one landmark event after another.

Just a few years ago people said that AI would never be creative. And yet AI now feels like an endless river of creativity, making poetry and images and music and video that stretch the imagination. People said it would never be empathetic. And yet today millions of people enjoy meaningful conversations with AIs, talking about their hopes and dreams and helping them work through difficult emotional challenges.

AIs can now drive cars, manage energy grids and even invent new molecules. Just a few years ago each of these was impossible. And all of this is turbocharged by spiraling exponentials of data and computation.

Last year Inflection-2.5, our last model, used 5 billion times more computation than the Deep Mind AI that beat the old school Atari games just over 10 years ago. That's nine orders of magnitude more computation – 10x per year, every year for almost a decade.

Over the same time, the size of these models has grown from first tens of millions of parameters to then billions of parameters, and very soon tens of trillions of parameters.

If someone did nothing but read 24 hours a day for their entire life, they'd consume 8 billion words. And of course that's a lot of words. But today the most advanced AIs consume more than eight trillion words in a single month of training. And all of this is set to continue.

The long arc of technological history is now in an extraordinary new phase.

So what does this mean in practice? Well just as the Internet gave us the browser and the smartphone gave us Apps, the cloud-based supercomputer is ushering in a new era of ubiquitous AIs.

everything will soon be represented by a conversational interface. Or to put it in another way, a personal AI. And these AIs will be infinitely knowledgeable, and soon they'll be factually accurate and reliable. They'll have near perfect IQ. They'll also have exceptional EQ. They'll be kind, supportive, empathetic.

These elements on their own would be transformational. Just imagine if everybody had a personalized tutor in their pocket and access to low-cost medical advice. A lawyer and a doctor, a business strategist and a coach, all in your pocket 24 hours a day.

But things really start to change when they develop what I call AQ, their “Actions Quotient”. This is their ability to actually get stuff done in the digital and physical world. And before long it won't just be people that have AIs.

Strange as it may sound, every organisation from small business to nonprofit to national government, each will have their own AI. Every town, building and object will be represented by a unique interactive persona. And these won't just be mechanistic assistants, they'll be companions, confidants, colleagues, friends and partners as varied and unique as we all.

At this point AIs will convincingly imitate humans at most tasks. And we'll feel this at the most intimate of scales. An AI organising a community get-together for an elderly neighbour. A sympathetic expert helping you make sense of a difficult diagnosis.

But we'll also feel it at the largest scales. Accelerating scientific discovery. Autonomous cars on the roads. Drones in the skies. They'll both order the takeout and run the power station. They'll interact with us and of course with each other. They'll speak every language, take in every pattern of sensor data, sights and sounds, streams and streams of information, far surpassing what any one of us could consume in a thousand lifetimes

So what is this? What are these AIs?

If we are to prioritise safety above all else, to ensure that this new wave always serves and amplifies humanity, then we need to find the right metaphors for what this might become.

For years, we in the AI community, and I specifically, have had a tendency to refer to this as just tools. But that doesn't really capture what's actually happening here. AIs are clearly more dynamic, more ambiguous, more integrated and more emergent than mere tools, which are entirely subject to human control.

So to contain this wave, to put human agency at its centre, and to mitigate the inevitable unintended consequences that are likely to arise, we should start to think about them as we might a new kind of digital species.

Now it's just an analogy, it's not a literal description and it's not perfect. For a start they clearly aren't biological in any traditional sense. But just pause for a moment and really think about what they already do.

They communicate in our languages. They see what we see. They consume unimaginably large amounts of information. They have memory. They have personality. They have creativity. They can even reason to some extent and formulate rudimentary plans. They can act autonomously if we allow them.

And they do all this at levels of sophistication that is far beyond anything that we've ever known from a mere tool. So saying AI is mainly about the math or the code is like saying we humans are mainly about carbon and water. It's true but it completely misses the point.

And yes I get it, this is a super arresting thought. But I honestly think this frame helps sharpen our focus on the critical issues. What are the risks? What are the boundaries that we need to impose? What kind of AI do we want to build or allow to be built?

This is a story that's still unfolding. Nothing should be accepted as a given. We all must choose what we create. What AIs we bring into the world or not. These are the questions for all of us here today, and all of us alive at this moment.

For me the benefits of this technology are stunningly obvious, and they inspire my life's work every single day. But quite frankly they'll speak for themselves.

Over the years I've never shied away from highlighting risks and talking about downsides. Thinking in this way helps us focus on the huge challenges that lie ahead for all of us. But let's be clear. There is no path to progress where we leave technology behind.

The prize for all of civilization is immense. We need solutions for healthcare, education and our climate crisis. And if AI delivers just a fraction of its potential, the next decade is going to be the most productive in human history.

Here's another way to think about it. In the past unlocking economic growth often came with huge downsides. The economy expanded as people discovered new continents and opened up new frontiers. But they colonised populations at the same time. We built factories but they were grim and dangerous places to work in. We struck oil but we polluted the planet.

Now because we are still designing and building AI, we have the potential and opportunity to do it better, radically better. And today we're
not discovering a new continent and plundering its resources. We're building one from scratch.

Sometimes people say that data or chips are the 21st century's new oil, but that's totally the wrong image. AI is to the mind what nuclear fusion is to energy. Limitless, abundant, world changing.

And AI really is different. That means we have to think about it creatively and honestly. We have to push our analogies and our metaphors to the very limits to be able to grapple with what's coming. Because this is not just another invention.

AI is itself an infinite inventor and yes this is exciting and promising and concerning and intriguing all at once. To be quite honest it's pretty surreal. But step back and see it on the long view of glacial time, and these really are the very most appropriate metaphors that we have today.

Since the beginning of life on Earth, we've been evolving, changing and then creating everything around us in our human world today. And AI isn't something outside of this story. In fact, it's the very opposite. It's the whole of everything that we have created, distilled down into something that we can all interact with and benefit from.

It's a reflection of humanity across time, and in this sense it isn't a new species at all. This is where the metaphors end.

Here's what I'll tell Caspian next time he asks. AI isn't separate. AI isn't even in some senses new. AI is us. It's all of us. And this is perhaps the most promising and vital thing of all that even a six-year-old can get a sense for.

As we build out AI we can and must reflect all that is good, all that we love, all that is special about humanity. Our empathy, kindness, curiosity and creativity. This I would argue is the greatest challenge of the 21st century. But also the most wonderful, inspiring and hopeful opportunity for all of us.